High fibre, high investment and high speeds

While it's been some years since the UK became a majority broadband nation but 2008 has still seen its fair share of shake-ups in the fat pipe world. silicon.com takes a look back at the stories that changed broadband this year.

Virgin hits top speed
As the year closed, Virgin Media announced a speed bump for its users, offering broadband speeds of up to 50Mbps for £51 per month using a mixture of fibre and coaxial cable.

Loving the laggards
While Virgin boasted of its hitting 50Mbps, 2008 saw regulators already making plans for the advent of 100Mbps, announcing a report that said those communities that missed out on the initial broadband rollout should leapfrog other areas this time around.

The £29bn fibre bill
We all knew a UK fibre rollout would cost an eye-watering amount but 2008 saw that amount finally declared: fibre-to-the-home would land the UK with a £29bn bill. Good job The Broadband Stakeholder Group reckons the benefits will outweigh the costs.

BT gets its wallet out
BT prepared itself for both fibre and spending billions this year, announcing it will spend £1.5bn on the first phase of a super speedy network rollout. The telco aims to give 10 million UK homes fibre access by 2012.

Fibre dodges credit crunch
As financial markets plummeted worldwide, there was talk of recession hitting BT's proposed fibre rollout. However, BT confirmed to silicon.com that the deployment shouldn't be affected by the recession except in cases where building projects due to carry fibre are shelved.

Broadband goes down the toilet
While the talk of the cost of a fibre rollout rages on, a handful of telcos grabbed the bull by the horn and started their own deployments. One such rollout saw Dundee OK the laying of cable down its sewers to give residents the fastest - and possibly smelliest - fat pipes.

The truth and nothing but the truth
After years of run-ins with the advertising standards watchdog over how closely advertised speeds should match their real world equivalent, Britain's ISPs got together and signed up to new code that sees them promising to give customers an accurate representation the speeds they should expect when they sign up to a new service.

Free broadband for kids
The Labour Party conference saw Prime Minister Gordon Brown announce a £300m scheme to give nearly every family in the UK free access to broadband at home.

The death of broadband has not been greatly exaggerated
As the landline has been displaced by the mobile phone, so mobile broadband is starting to edge out fixed. According to analysts Analysys, a quarter of us will use mobile broadband rather than fixed for our main fat pipe by 2013.

She cannae take it anymore cap'n
Been enjoying the unfettered broadband access that lets you cram iPlayer programme after iPlayer programme down your fat pipe? Don't get too used to it. According to US telco AT&T, the current systems that constitute the internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded and $55bn of investment is needed to shore up the infrastructure underpinning the net. Yikes.